Pipe Insulation Blog

Advanced Insulation is a growing, independent company. We supply pipe insulation products to our established base of customers via our Online Store , but we couldn't do it without you. I just wanted to write a short entry to say thank you for your business in 2012 to all of our customers, and to let you know we have some exciting new products coming in the New Year. AIM continues to grow year on year, in the ever increasing online market. We have worked to make the website easier to use, and give you greater choice this year, and will do the same again next. The cut off for the last orders to be shipped this year will be 1pm this Friday (21st December), and we will be back on the 2nd January. In case you missed it yesterday, we have a special offer on over this period - free shipping on orders over £100 between Saturday 22nd December 2012 and January 1st 2013 inclusive. Just use the promo code MERRYXMAS at the final stage of the checkout to claim this special of

This week (12 December) a British team of scientists and engineers realise a 16 year ambition to drill down through over 3 km of Antarctic ice into an ancient buried lake.  The team hopes to find signs of life in the water and clues to the Earth’s past climate in the mud at the lake floor. Using a high-pressure hot-water drill specially designed for the mission the 12-man team will begin boring a hole through solid ice into Lake Ellsworth on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet on Wednesday.   It will be a race against time to keep the access borehole open long enough to lower and raise two state-of-the-art instruments that will collect water samples from the lake surface to the lake bed, and a core of mud from the lake floor.  The team can only keep the borehole open for 24 hours before it refreezes to an unusable size, ultimately sealing the lake off again. Precision engineering and technology are at the heart of this scientific experiment.  The hot-water drill, designed by B

The team will have just 24 hours to access the lake before the borehole refreezes. Although hot-water drilling technology has been used extensively by Antarctic scientists on previous experiments, at 3 km this will be the deepest borehole ever made this way. The hot water drill is designed to cope with extraordinary environmental conditions. It needs to operate continuously for 3 days to create a 360 mm wide borehole through the ice into the lake. At -20°C freezing inside the borehole reduces its diameter by 0.6 cm per hour. Ice and water from the hole need to be recycled as drilling fluid to minimize the potential for contamination. Not only must the drill penetrate 3 km of ice, it must also be free from contamination. It’s a major challenge to design, source and manufacture the specialized equipment and components required for this project. And of course, all of this gear had to make the long journey from the UK to Antarctica in containers that can fit inside an air